Tag: Game Design

  • “It’s Just a Game”: How to Avoid Annoying Your Online Audience to Death

    “It’s Just a Game”: How to Avoid Annoying Your Online Audience to Death

    Understanding how your online multiplayer game may be used to abuse your player base by bad apples is a key component to keeping a healthy audience of friendly, inclusive, and happy players. If you find your audience begin to skew more toxic and angry, take a look at your game and what elements may be specifically abrasive when played by someone who wants to ruin the fun for everyone else.

    Games are not meant to be taken too seriously. There’s a reason that little league baseball diamonds have signs to warn parents against getting too heated during their child’s game. That being said, it is human to take something one is passionate about to heart. Telling folks that “it’s just a game” is often an unhelpful dismissal of the experience that person is having, especially in instances where the game design itself is to blame for the player’s frustrations. Keep in mind, a developer’s job is to evoke specific emotions: it is not the player’s job to be in the right mindset or react appropriately.

    Giving players the chance to chat with one another is becoming increasingly unnecessary as accessibility features progress rapidly. Context specific pinging systems, canned alerts, and emojis offer plenty of chances for players to interact without the chance of them throwing slurs and insults at one another. Let folks communicate through their favorite VoIP application with people they like and keep in-game communication as an options for players to opt in for instead of having it as a default setting.

    “I love being an annoying prick in online games, especially when I’m better than my opponent. Do I think that’s a particularly pleasant personality trait? Hell no!”

    Bad actors can use more than just communication tools to troll and goad other players; specific game designs can often be abused, if not used as intended, to annoy and frustrate opponents. This is an established tactic in all competitive games, but there is a reason that competitive poker players are limited in how they can interact with the other players at the table. A good litmus test for whether a mechanic could potentially be used as a psychological shiv against others is for designers to playtest with competitive players rather than with other developers. Letting more invested players beat your ass by wiping your mental stack and making you want to punch your monitor can be an effective way to iron out these kinds of tools.

    Animations, aesthetics, and sounds can also be used by players to annoy and frustrate others. Anyone who has played a particularly spicy Jigglypuff player in Smash Bros. knows how old it gets to hear them taunt repeatedly from across the stage. Costumes and cosmetics can be specifically tailored to vex opponents just as easily. Mortal Kombat’s fatalities are infamous for causing players to turn off their game in anger. Were they just as bad back in the arcades? Probably, but being online only exacerbates the issue.

    There is a long precedent of both games that lean into aggressive behavior and avert negative play experiences through clever design. Mortal Kombat 1 is an example of playing both sides: players can brutally disembowel each other post-match but attempting to tea-bag one’s opponent will result in an innocuous taunt instead. NetherRealm Studios also made the baffling decision to let players chat over VoIP by default. Apex Legends does a stellar job of encouraging interaction between team mates without requiring them to communicate verbally or through chat. Most games don’t even allow randomly matchmade opponents to chat with one another, but even canned messages and emojis can be abused. At the end of the day, there is nothing to replace community moderation, but developers have plenty of tools in their repertoire to avert a player’s influence over others’ emotional wellbeing.

    Each piece of your design can and will be used against other players by bad actors if you let them. I should know… I love being an annoying prick in online games, especially when I’m better than my opponent. Do I think that’s a particularly pleasant personality trait? Hell no! There will always be a place for people like me in online games, but it should be a result of intentional design and not an accidental byproduct of innocent intentions. Keep in mind how players will play your game beyond the boundaries of your expectations and help avoid tensions among players by resolving those pain points before they become cudgels used to beat your audience into submission.

  • Player Psychographics in Warhammer 40k

    Player Psychographics in Warhammer 40k

    Everyone is different. Thankfully, tabletop wargames offer a great case study of the various player psychographics that help designers categorize different types of players and what makes them tick. Timmy, Jimmy, Spike, and Vorthos are all equally valid and developers should be cognisant of their wants, needs, and turn-offs.

    The Tau Empire is well known for its devastating ranged firepower and not much else. This polarizing design offers players who are drawn to that play style a comfortable and familiar place to get into Warhammer while leaving a sour taste in other players’ mouths who prefer meeting their opponents in face-to-face combat. It is often more effective to create a game that some people love and some people dislike than a game that everyone thinks is so-so. Focusing on the various types of players your game will attract will help you create unique experiences that will resonate with different types of people.

    Orkz are as simple as it gets: march forward, charge, and clobber your opponent. Timmy prefers showing up to the game table with a few beers and a bowl of peanuts and appreciates the lack of complexity, while Johnny would be bored before the game even started.

    Johnny wants to express something about themselves, and thankfully, tabletop gaming offers plenty of opportunities. Not only does the act of hobbying create a sense of ownership, but the Johnny will also be happy as a clam with a list building app or a codex with all of the options and combos they have at their disposal laid bare.

    Spike isn’t looking for a specific aesthetic or style as much as they enjoy the experience of learning and perfecting their gameplay to be the best that they can be. Skill expression isn’t as much of a concern, as long as they have the best chance at winning. This player will be more focused on the minutae of gameplay rather than anything else and pushing specific values in certain areas will give them plenty of clues to discover.

    Vorthos are often more difficult to design for, given they are specifically drawn to the storylines, characters, and background lore. Tabletop wargaming offers a unique look into potential gameplay hooks for these types of players; fundamentally tabletop gaming is about shared storytelling and these players will be most drawn to that aspect of the game. Artwork, stories, and the miniatures themselves will do wonders towards catching a Vorthos’ eye.

    These basic player psychographics extend far past tabletop wargaming, but they can be especially useful when designing a multifaceted miniatures strategy game. No player will love every aspect of your project, but when each feature is designed to be loved by someone, you’re bound to have left a memorable expression.

  • Magic Lessons for Fighting Game Developers

    Magic: the Gathering’s most prized treasure, Mark Rosewater, presented a panel at CDC called “20 Lessons from 20 Years of Magic.” His speech focused on various aspects of game design lessons that he had learned over his tenure at Wizards of the Coast, but many can apply to fighting games as well. Please excuse me as I loosely paraphrase Mr. Rosewater and cherrypick his lessons that I find specifically valuable. There’s a chance I may have also heard of these on his podcast, Drive to Work.

    Player Psychographics

    Take the player psychographics that Rosewater so often references when discussing the audience for Magic: the Gathering for example. The spectrum of Timmy, Johnny, Spike, and Vorthos is a lens through which you can view anyone, not just card game players. To paraphrase Mr. Rosewater, a Timmy plays to experience something spectacular, a Johnny plays to prove something about themselves, a Spike plays to win, and a Vorthos plays to experience the story. 

    The fighting game community includes more specific player archetypes, but I would argue that we all have a little bit of Timmy, Johnny, Vorthos, and Spike in each of us. Keeping these hypothetical players in mind when designing your fighter will ensure that you’ve done your due diligence to include a wide variety of player perspectives into your work (or not, if that’s more your style!)

    Don’t Fight Human Nature

    At the end of the day, game design is all about conveying and in many ways teaching players complex concepts without ever being able to sit down with them individually. Part of that journey is doing one’s best to pack as much information up-front as possible by utilizing ideas and concepts that the player is already familiar with to ease them into learning about whatever it is that makes your game unique.

    The first step on that path is to acknowledge that you cannot and should not try to fight human nature unless that is the expressed purpose of what you are trying to pull off. Otherwise, it’s best to stick to the familiar when necessary and use that to expect certain responses in return.

    Players have a finite amount of time and a near-infinite inventory of great fighting games to enjoy. Don’t expect a player to want to learn how to ride a pogo stick when they already know how to ride a bicycle, for lack of a suitable metaphor. Only spend those precious mental resources on teaching your players about what makes your game cool!

    Look at this selection of vampire colors!

    Discovery & Self Expression Are Vital

    Although it differs among players, a key component to analyzing the player psychographics mentioned above is that each player is, in some part, in it for themselves. That isn’t to say that they don’t care about the other players, but they do ultimately want to express or discover something about themselves. 

    Providing that player agency can be as simple as a variety of color palette choices at character select or as complex as an in-depth combo system that requires years to truly master. Whatever avenue for self expression your game eventually utilizes, being cognizant of what you are providing your audience to discover will make for a more compelling player experience.

    If Your Theme Isn’t At Common, It’s Not Your Theme

    I’ve left this for last simply because it deserves more explanation than the others. Magic: the Gathering separates its cards into a variety of rarities: common, uncommon, rare, and mythic rare. These have differing rates of occurrence in a booster pack, meaning that most players who purchase products from Wizards of the Coast will run into commons way more often than rare or mythic rares.

    These categories offer designers a chance to throttle the player experience and leave more complex concepts or mechanics for rare or mythic rare cards. If a new player runs into a complex mythic rare, that’s okay because it is only one of potentially hundreds of other cards they own, most of which are simple enough to grok without years of experience playing the game at a high level.

    Fighting games are similar, except instead of gating mechanics behind card rarities, fighters have normals, command normals, target combos, specials, ex specials, super arts, super desperation moves, and too many more to list here. Most of a character’s moves are going to be normals—their punches, kicks, and basic martial art attacks. Street Fighter’s Ryu, for example, has plenty of normal moves (Street Fighter is traditionally a six-button fighter), but only three or four special moves, and one to three super arts in his arsenal. Throwing a fireball requires a unique joystick notation as well, leaving some new players left mashing buttons rather than trying to do a 623 motion.

    “Grok?”

    Mr. Rosewater emphasizes in his lessons on card game design that whatever one’s theme is, it should be readily apparent to a new player after confronting their first booster pack of cards. Given that only 3/15 of the cards in any normal pack will be uncommon and 1/15 of them will be rare or mythic rare (although they’ve changed the specific numbers and types of booster packs since I quit playing), that means that 11 of the 15 cards that a new player purchases will be common and, therefore, limited to being relatively simple compared to others.

    In the same way that a Magic set’s theme should be apparent at common, so too should a fighting game’s theme be apparent to players who simply mash buttons and don’t wait long enough to learn how to do a hadouken. If you don’t want players to have to worry about links or precise timing between normals, make your basic attacks chain into one another. If you want to focus on aerial combat, give some fighters grounded normals that leave them airborne. Conversely, if you want a fighter to focus on grounded combat, provide them opportunities to keep their opponent where they are most effective and limit their options to jump. 

    This applies to both universal mechanics and character-specific themes; if your most inexperienced players can’t “get it” after hitting a few buttons, it needs to be better baked into the foundation of the player experience.

    Thanks for reading!

  • Ode to the Barrens – Classic WoW Zone Design

    Ode to the Barrens – Classic WoW Zone Design

    When it comes to Vanilla World of Warcraft leveling zones, two stand out the most: Westfall and the Barrens. Each represent the 10-20 leveling experience for both Alliance and Horde respectively. While Westfall was one of the first leveling zones developed for WoW, it’s easy to see how much love and care went into the development of the area. There are long quest chains that tell the story of a gang of bandits and a global conspiracy, as well as smaller, more charming quests that litter the zone. The Barrens, on the other hand, stays relatively true to its name; it’s pretty barren when you get down to it.

    That being said, there is still a large population of the World of Warcraft community (especially those who frequent private servers to get their vanilla fix) that holds the Barrens close to their heart. Nostalgia is a helluva drug, but there might also be something beneath the rose colored glasses worth exploring to discover what made Barrens such a beloved leveling zone, despite it’s obvious short comings.

    5. Crossing the Plains

    One of the biggest complaints about The Barrens (both from the developers and from many players) was that there was far too much walking for a 10-20 zone. Without a mount, having to cross the entire zone on foot could be tedious, running from quest givers in the Crossroads, Ratchet, and Camp Taurajo to their requested destinations across the wild plains. Not only are these areas nearly flat and devoid of vegetation (except for a few oasis scattered around), but what they are heavily populated with is mobs that want to kill you dead.

    In this way, the Barrens is a great example of what made vanilla World of Warcraft so immersive. The wide, open plains reward exploration, provide a unique sense of scale to the world, and offer a wholly unique aesthetic to what we were used to seeing in traditional high fantasy fiction. Despite what modern game design might describe as “barriers to entry” that need to be improved by “quality of life” changes, vanilla World of Warcraft thrives when the player feels like part of a larger world. Sometimes these aspects of Azeroth can be annoying (.e.g Getting stuck on a continent with no idea where to go, etc), but they can often make the results of your labor feel all the more rewarding.

    4. Flight Paths

    On a similar note, thanks to the lack of mounts for players before level 40, the Barrens is a great opportunity to show off Kalimdor in all its glory from above. Flight paths (WoW’s version of taxi cabs or Uber) offer players a great view of the plains, the tops of mountains, and the luscious oasis that pop up throughout the Barrens. Once again, forced downtime (a mechanic that is often considered a sin among modern MMO designers) offers players time to reflect on their quests, plan for their future adventures, and take in all that the world has to offer. Flight paths offer this in spades, giving players a new perspective on the world around them and, perhaps, providing enough of an incentive to explore newfound opportunities while traveling by air.

    3. Wailing Caverns

    World of Warcraft’s instanced Dungeons are almost as much as a part of Azeroth as the open world is. This is especially true of early leveling dungeons, like Deadmines and Wailing Caverns, as they introduced newbies to group content and provided plenty of opportunities for player killers to wreck havoc on the PvE-focused populace. Wailing Caverns is a spectacular dungeon that represents a lot of firsts for fledgling Horde players; not only is it the first dungeon most Orcs, Trolls, Tauren, and Undead come across where they’re in danger of being ganked by Alliance players but it also blurs the line between instanced and open-world dungeon content. Although the maze of caverns can often feel tedious after a few runs through, WC will forever be pillar for why the Barrens is such a memorable leveling zone.

    2. The Crossroads is Under Attack!

    Along a similar train of thought to the Wailing Caverns, the corresponding central quest hub, called the Crossroads, was a bastion for early-WoW world PvP. Low and high level characters alike would duke it out over control of the Horde leveling town. Having quick access by way of the neutral town of Ratchet, Alliance players were given a perfect opportunity to gank unsuspecting Horde lowbies. As is a common pattern for content that stands out in vanilla WoW as particularly memorable, the Crossroads was a hot bed for player interaction, both in group questing and group debauchery and it will forever be synonymous with the pleasures of leveling a Horde toon.

    1. Flavor of the Horde

    One of the most charming factors that brought me to World of Warcraft initially was how different the Horde felt as opposed to other, more traditional high fantasy stories. Most games didn’t revolve around the ugly monsters or the more mundane aspects of life as an orc. The Barrens provides a perfect example of the diverse background of the Horde, giving players a more calm, nature-focused lens through which to view the warriors clans from Orgrimmar. From the scattered outposts to the shimmering oasis, the Barrens will forever be a quintessential part of the leveling experience for Horde players, and as such, outlives whatever perceived flaws designers may have attributed to it over the years. Creating a flat, barren space doesn’t sound like a recipe for game environment success, but the Barrens achieved the nearly impossible.

  • The Delicate Balance of Complexity Allowance

    The Delicate Balance of Complexity Allowance

    Game design is often a juggling act involving complexity and the audience’s attention. Every game needs some level of complexity to evoke specific emotions in their players, but humans only have a finite amount of attention that they can (or want to) give to your game at any given moment. Each specific element of a game should be evaluated against the added complexity that it will bring to the overall project.

    This can create issues, however, especially when designers get attached to mechanics or assets that they might be better off cutting. The old adage “kill your darlings” applies to games just as much to creative writing, but it can be hard to quantify exactly how complex any given mechanic or how it’s purpose in the design affects how the idea should be evaluated.

    Another hurdle every designer must eventually cross is deciding whether a specific action is healthier as a player decision. Often, it’s easy to get caught up in a cool sequence of actions and lose sight of the overall vision. Those moments have their place, but it’s also important to weigh the value of that decision point against the player’s overall attention. Is the player overwhelmed with choices? How does this affect the player’s experience? What is the reasoning behind this specific sequence? If the player already had enough to keep track of, adding another decision for them could ruin the experience, no matter how interesting or cool the resulting action could have been.

    The goal isn’t always necessarily to simply things either. Decisions represent significant points in gameplay, moments that test the players skills and understanding. Throw too many of these at a player and they can start to feel discouraged, if not completely turned off, by the added opportunity. Humans don’t like messing up, especially when other people are watching, and no matter how you frame the question, there will always be a “right” and “wrong” answer, or at least the player will see it that way. The more questions, the more potential chances for them to embarrass themselves.

    Sometimes it’s better to force the player to perform the desired outcome, rather than give them the chance to fail. Other times, creating mechanics that specifically check the players ability to overcome a challenge is the way to go. It’s a blurry line at best.

    Recently, I went through the entire design document for my latest project with the intention of reducing the overall complexity of the average game state. What I found was that it was relatively easy to cut back on some mechanics, making certain actions simpler or more directed towards their desired outcome. In most cases, I removed superfluous effects that would only really matter once in a blue moon.

    The resulting game should be cleaner, more elegant, and easier to play now that the average game state is less complex and, therefore, easier to grok. Sure, some moves lost a little luster, but it’s a cheap price to pay for the game being more easily approachable. Keep in mind, the first game decides whether a player will keep playing. Making the learning experience as smooth as possible is paramount for creating an experience that players will want to come back to.